Sturgeon’s successor will inherit ‘mess’ of SNP at war with itself

Key resignations, ideological conflicts and drop in membership numbers have left the SNP close to collapse

They are phrases the Scottish National party once happily used as attack lines against the Conservatives and Labour: “tremendous mess”, “unedifying” and “spectacularly wrong”.

Yet they came from the SNP’s new acting chief executive and its honorary president, Mike Russell, and he was talking about his own party. “I think it is fair to say there is a tremendous mess and we have to clear it up,” he told the BBC on Sunday.